I'm wondering how miserable human's lifetime in comparison to the nature's one. Just for understanding I try to draw the universal scale.
in the past:
- The Birth of the Universe - ~ 13,8 billion years ago
- The generation of first stars in the Milky Way - ~13,2 billion years ago
- The generation of the Sun - ~4,57 billion years ago
- The generation of the Earth - ~4,54 billion years ago
- The appearance of life - ~4,1 billion years ago
- The appearance of the first prenuclear organisms (prokaryotes) - ~ 4billion years ago
- The appearance of the first cells with a nucleus (eukaryotes) - ~2,1 billion years ago
- The appearance of the first land plants - ~475 million years ago
- The appearance of the first dinosaurs - ~230 million years ago
- The appearance of the first primates - ~66 million years ago
- The appearance of the genus Homo - ~2,8 million years ago
- The appearance of the Homo Sapience - ~200 thousand years ago
- The settlement of almost all icing-free areas of the globe by humans - ~12 thousand years ago
- The origin of the Neolithic revolution - ~10 thousand years ago
- The emergence of the first states - ~5 thousand years ago
- The origin of the philosophy- ~2,5 thousand years ago
- The estimated date of birth of Jesus Christ according to the text of the New Testament - ~2 thousand years ago
- The start of the Industrial Revolution - ~300 years ago
- The invention of the nuclear bomb - ~90 years ago
- The landing of people on the Moon - ~50 years ago
- The invention of the World Wide Web - ~35 years ago
in the future:
- The colonization of Mars - ~100 years ahead
- The achieving 200 years human life-span - ~200 years ahead (my beliefs)
- The unitedness of continents of the Earth in a new supercontinent - ~250 million years ahead
- Life on the surface of the Earth becomes impossible due to the increase in the brightness of the Sun - ~500 million years ahead
- The Eukaryotic life on Earth is dying out due to carbon dioxide starvation - ~1 billion years ahead
- The death of the Sun - ~5 billion years ahead
- The end of star formation - ~1 trillion years ahead
- The beginning of the era of decay - ~100 trillion years ahead
Scary? Exciting? Unbelievable? I think understanding of this scale should accelerate progress and its appreciation. We should to survive at any cost. And "at least I [we] tried" as said Randle McMurphy in the novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"...